I am not a first time linux user; I used Ubuntu previously but I do not agree with Canonical decisions for the OS lately. I do support free software, however I am not a complete die-hard over the cause. I use the software that allows me to get the job done. I will use the Free Software if it is available, but if not I will use proprietary. That being said, all I do is word processing and programming, so there probably isn't any proprietary software found on my computer. All my drivers are free.

As mentioned earlier, I am a programmer. I hope to get involved with some packages and development within the community. I find myself constantly making small little changes to a lot of Free/Open Source programs, so it would be nice to share some of that work, and perhaps even to work on something a little more important. I am fluent in C, Java, Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp, Clojure, Python, and x86 Assembly. I find that I like the Lisp variants best for smaller projects, and that for bigger projects I lean towards C and Java. I don't like C++, I think it's a semantically ugly language. If I need to do something where I have to work lower to the system, I will just use C, even if it means some extra lines. In Java I usually work in Netbeans, and I use Emacs to write in for the other ones. My preffered C Compiler is the GCC. My preffered assembler is the GNU Assembler.

Welcome aboard! With that skill set you can contribute to many open source projects (except, skip KDE as that is a C++ project). If you want to help out on Linux Mint (we use C, JavaScript and Python), the source code is here: https://github.com/linuxmint. Cinnamon and Nemo especially are vibrant projects right now, with lots of exciting development going on. Here is the roadmap for the next Linux Mint release: https://github.com/linuxmint/Roadmap. The developers hang out at #linuxmint-dev on irc.spotchat.org, you're welcome to say hi